Bringing parents together: an innovative approach for parental involvement in an immersion school in the Basque Autonomous Community

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyse the programme and pedagogy of Karmelo Ikastola, a Basque immersion school that promotes parental involvement and language use within the family. The Karmelo case is noteworthy due to its success at effectively promoting the use of Basque among students inside and outside the school along with its promotion of curricular separation between L1 native speakers and L2 learners of Basque. With support from the EBETE language cooperative, Karmelo launched an innovative approach to increase parental involvement in 2008. The school considers distinct pedagogical frameworks for different profiles of parents: Basque-speaking parents, mixed families (in which only one of the parents speaks Basque), and Spanish-speaking parents. The Karmelo programme also fosters parental participation and engagement via curricular adaptations that differentiate the needs of L1 and L2 speakers. The focus group data offer insights into the programme’s approach to language instruction and acquisition, highlighting the role that linguistic attitudes and socialisation play during the various stages of L2 acquisition.

KEYWORDS:

• Language revitalisation
• family transmission
• immersion school
• second-language acquisition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In terms of families from other countries at Karmelo Ikastola, 8.5% come from countries as diverse as Romania, Congo, Russia, Nigeria, and Ukraine. This percentage is comparable to that of other schools in the BAC (8.9%).

2. Other BAC immersion schools also follow this model of separation between L2 and L1 speakers (Calvo Gómez and Pantoja Vargas 1990). However, the concrete number of schools that have implemented this separation has not been documented.